Autumn's Lens

Autumn's Lens

This is a sideblog of @autumnlilybug for my photography :] I hope you like it!!

What I Use:

Camera: Nikon D50 DSLR

Lens: Tamron 18-270mm Di II VC B003

Software: Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop (on rare occasion)

Copyright Info:

Unless otherwise specified, my photos may not be used for any purpose covered under copyright law by anyone other than myself. By posting them on this blog I do not give you implicit permission to reuse or repurpose my photos. If you would like to share my photos with other people, please do so by linking to my blog rather than by copying them or taking screenshots if at all possible. Under no circumstances may you remove or obscure my watermark in any way.

This is a photo I took two years ago on a vacation to Hawaii with my family. I wanted to try emulating a "filmic" aesthetic in Lightroom and this shot seemed like a good test case. Here's the original photo straight out of the camera (other than color space conversion and slight sharpening automatically applied by Lightroom during the export):

I took this photo on my Nikon D50, using my Tamron 18-270mm lens. The camera was set at an ISO of 360 (automatic), and the photo was taken with a shutter speed of 1/1600 of a second, an aperture of f/6.0 and a focal length of 120mm. For a control case I went through my usual editing process and ended up with this:

Then I made two other variations, one which I'm calling "filmic" style and one which I'm calling "technicolor", the latter of which uses different color grading and slightly different detail settings but is otherwise a variation of the prior:

Discussion

The primary thing these variations have in common is that all three use the exact same lens correction settings. They also feature a similar color grading approach to the orange tones, which I have pulled down significantly to mute the bright orange parts of the rock, which I felt were distracting. All of them are also notably less exposed than the original (though this comes from adjustments to the whites and highlights as well as from the color profile more than it does from the actual "exposure" setting), since it was quite overexposed fresh out of the camera.

The primary difference of the filmic looks from my usual style ended up being the lighting, with much less contrast, and brighter blacks, shadows and highlights, though they use the same overall exposure adjustment (which is actually pretty minimal). They also feature less saturated blues and greens, with the technicolor look having aquas pulled slightly more towards blue than the filmic and "standard" variants. The technicolor look has similar texture and clarity adjustments to the standard, while the filmic look has less of a boost. Both the filmic and technicolor looks have a slight grain applied. The standard variant is also sharpened less than the film emulations, which needed more sharpening to compensate for the lack of detail caused by reduced contrast.

Photos taken during my trip to Catalonia a couple years ago. All were taken on my Nikon D50 with the 18-55mm kit lens, except for the last one which used the 55-200mm kit lens.

Photos taken yesterday (2026-01-26) from my apartment during the snowstorm :)